Search Markers

Calvert, TX

This 11-acre burying ground holds some 400 Texas pioneers on land first granted in 1835 and bought in 1850 by Judge Robert Calvert, a leader of the vanished town of Sterling. Calvert dedicated the cemetery and built an adjoining Cumberland Presbyterian church from his own plantation timber; after his death in 1867 the congregation hauled the church by oxen to the new town of Calvert two miles east. In 1868 his widow and daughters deeded the site to the Cumberland Presbyterians.

Sterling City, TX

The prairie split by the north Concho River was long the hunting ground of the Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Lipan, and Wichita peoples, and may have been crossed by Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 1860s and 70s came commercial buffalo hunters, one of whom, Capt. W. S. Sterling, gave his name to the creek; the outlaws Frank and Jesse James reputedly kept horse herds nearby, and the Army held Camp Elizabeth as a Fort Concho outpost. As big cattle outfits and then family homesteaders moved in, the county was created in 1891 and named for its first regular resident.

Sterling City, TX

Built in 1912, two decades after Sterling County was organized, this two-story jail was raised by the Southern Structural Steel Co. on land donated by the Stewart family, its exterior faced in locally quarried stone. The ground floor held living quarters for the sheriff, while seven cells occupied the upper story. A rear addition followed in the 1960s.

Heath, TX

Virginia-born Sterling Rex Barnes brought his family to this area from Mississippi in 1846, settling the community of Black Hill, now Heath. A charter member of a local Masonic lodge and the area's justice of the peace, he operated a toll bridge over the east fork of the Trinity River at a site now beneath Lake Ray Hubbard. Five of his sons and a son-in-law went on to serve the Confederacy during the Civil War.

El Dorado County, CA

In the 1850s and '60s, Green Valley Road was a bustling artery into the Sierra foothills, funneling gold-seekers, freight, and travelers toward California's mining country. The Central Overland Pony Express thundered past this spot on its famous relay between Missouri and Sacramento, and roadside inns sprang up to feed and shelter the constant stream of riders, teamsters, and stagecoach passengers. For a few short years this stretch of dusty road was the beating heart of the Gold Rush frontier.

Jefferson, TX

Jacob and Ernestine Sterne settled in the riverport town of Jefferson before the Civil War and became civic pillars, helping run the post office and shaping its cultural life — part of the outsized role Jewish families played in the town's rise. In 1913 their children honored them by giving the city a cast-iron fountain from New York's J.L. Mott Foundry, crowned with sculptor Giuseppe Moretti's statue of Hebe, Greek goddess of youth. Designed to water people and animals alike, it still marks the family's legacy.

Weymouth, MA

For nearly a century the Stetson Shoe Company was a mainstay of Weymouth, Massachusetts, one of the towns south of Boston that made the region a center of American footwear manufacturing. Operating from 1885 until 1973, the factory employed generations of local workers before New England's shoe industry declined in the later twentieth century.

Weymouth, MA

This antique lightning-rod tower survives from the Stetson Shoe Factory, which operated in Weymouth, Massachusetts, from 1885 to 1973. Lightning protection was vital for the era's large timber-framed mill and factory buildings, where machinery, leather, and airborne dust made fire a constant threat.

City of Utica, NY

This monument honors Major General Friedrich Wilhelm, Baron von Steuben, the Prussian-trained officer who joined the American cause and drilled the ragged Continental Army into a disciplined fighting force at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–78. His training manual shaped American soldiering for decades, and after the Revolution he settled in New York, where the surrounding Oneida County region keeps his memory close. A monument in Utica places his legacy squarely in the community that became his American home.

Salina, KS

This plaza commemorates Steve Fossett's record-setting flight aboard the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, which in 2005 completed the first solo, nonstop, non-refueled flight around the world. The purpose-built aircraft launched from Salina, Kansas, whose long runway made the ambitious circumnavigation possible.

San Antonio, TX

Completed in 1891, the Stevens Building is among the finest survivors of San Antonio's late-19th-century commercial district, designed in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style by architect James Riely Gordon. Its ground floor long held dry goods and furniture stores, while the second story served in turn as the city's scientific society headquarters and as the real estate office of owner John Stevens. The building embodies the confident architecture of a booming Gilded Age city.

Hochheim, TX

In 1846 Joseph and Sarah Ann Stevens arrived from Rankin County, Mississippi, with relatives and a number of enslaved people, buying land from members of Green DeWitt's Colony to farm and raise cattle. The family burial ground holds its oldest marker over the 1851 grave of their infant son, and the child's grandfather Elisha Stevens was laid to rest nearby months later. Pioneer family members, veterans, and descendants are honored here.

Xenia Township, OH

When this bridge went up in 1877, the covered wooden span was still the workhorse of rural American roads, its roof and siding shielding the timber trusses from the weather that would otherwise rot them within a decade. Its builder, the Smith Bridge Company of Toledo, Ohio, was founded by Robert W. Smith, who patented a distinctive truss design that let his firm ship prefabricated bridges by rail across the country. The Stevenson Road bridge carried Greene County traffic for well over a century before finally retiring in 2003, and it survives today as one of the comparatively few Smith truss spans still standing.

Junction, TX

Born in Kimble County in 1888 with barely two years of formal schooling, Coke R. Stevenson worked his way from a boyhood ranch job to owning a freight line, then rose through banking, law, and county office. He became the first Texan to hold the state's three highest offices, and as governor from 1941 to 1947 he turned a large deficit into a surplus while championing measures from the first driver's-license law to the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Saginaw, MI

This marker honors Steveland Morris — Stevie Wonder — at the Saginaw homesite where he spent part of his early childhood before Motown superstardom. Born blind in 1950, he rose from Michigan to become one of the most celebrated singers, instrumentalists, and composers in music history. The community that remembers him here celebrates a hometown talent whose influence spread worldwide.

Fairfield, TX

The settlement around Stewards Mill grew up beginning in 1849 around Washington Steward's grist mill, the only one in the area, which drew a post office, brick plant, sawmill, and the county's first telephone exchange. The store dating to 1869 remained in the hands of an early partner's heirs, its doorstep an original millstone and its 1964 interior still fitted with the first counters, bins, and cabinets.

Commerce, TX

John and Ellen Stewart settled here about 1843, and John is credited with building the first pioneer home in eastern Hunt County during the Republic of Texas era. The family later sold land to the founder of nearby Commerce. The earliest legible marker is a child's grave from 1863, and the cemetery holds Confederate veterans — including the Stewart sons — as well as victims of an early-1900s epidemic.

Sulphur Springs, TX

On land first claimed by Hopkins County settler Zacharias Birdwell, this quiet burial ground began as Birdwell's Graveyard, taking its earliest known grave around 1870. When Birdwell's widow Polly deeded the property to her nephew W. A. Stewart in 1882, the cemetery took his name. Its two dozen marked graves—from an infant buried in 1879 to a final interment in 1915—hold the founding families of a corner of northeast Texas.

Carson City, NV

Founded as the Carson Indian Training School, the Stewart Indian School was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs for nearly a century to give vocational and academic instruction to Native American students gathered from across the West. First superintendent W.D.C. Gibson renamed it for Senator William Morris Stewart, who secured its federal funding, and in the 1920s Superintendent Frederick Snyder launched a building program in which students worked alongside stone masons — some from the Hopi Tribe — to raise the distinctive stone buildings still standing on the National Register–listed campus.

Village of Stewart Manor, NY

This twisted length of steel was recovered from the World Trade Center, destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed. The village of Stewart Manor placed it outside its village hall and dedicated the memorial on the seventeenth anniversary of the attacks in 2018. Salvaged WTC steel was distributed to communities nationwide so each could keep the vow to 'never forget.'

Bertram, TX

Benjamin Hansford Stewart left Tennessee for Texas in 1851 and made his living as a farmer and rancher, serving a term as Burnet County sheriff in the 1870s. In 1905 he built this frame house for his son Homer and daughter-in-law Viola, a typical Hill Country ranch home of its day set off by a chimney of hand-hewn limestone. Six generations of the Stewart family have lived in and cared for it.

Galveston, TX

This ridge on the west end of Galveston Island holds one of the area's oldest known histories of human use — once a campsite for the seagoing Karankawa people — before it passed through a striking succession of nineteenth- and twentieth-century owners. Texas Revolution veteran Col. Warren D. C. Hall bought it in 1856; later owners named it "Mottexas" and "Isla Ranch," and in 1933 it took the name of Galvestonian Maco Stewart, founder of the Stewart Title Company. The land was eventually deeded to the University of Texas for its Galveston medical branch, layering Indigenous, frontier, and modern uses on a single stretch of shore.

Carson City, NV

Built about 1860 of local sandstone, this house was the home of William Morris Stewart until 1862, when he sold it to James W. Nye, the territorial governor. After Nevada achieved statehood in 1864, the two men were elected its first United States senators—Stewart serving into the twentieth century and Nye through 1873—both of them New York natives. The house later belonged to state Supreme Court Chief Justice George F. Talbot before becoming a Catholic rectory in 1917.

Stewartstown, PA

The Stewartstown Railroad was chartered in 1884, during the Gilded Age boom when short-line railroads stitched small Pennsylvania towns into the national network of commerce. Running just a few miles from Stewartstown to a connection near New Freedom, it carried freight and passengers and linked the community outward to Baltimore, Harrisburg, and York. The handsome station built here in 1914 anchored the town's Main Street to that wider world, moving farm goods to market and travelers to the cities beyond.

Manheim, PA · est. 1962

On this site the flamboyant ironmaster and entrepreneur Henry William Stiegel — who styled himself "Baron" — built a glassworks that operated from 1763 to 1774. His tableware and decorative glass were among the finest produced in colonial America, prized then and treasured by collectors ever since. The original building stood until 1813, long after Stiegel's overreaching ventures collapsed into debt.

Comfort, TX

German-born stonemason and sheep rancher Herman Stieler designed and built this rock house in 1890–1892 in the Hill Country near Comfort. He had hauled freight for the Schreiner Company and to Camp Verde before making his place a shearing station where fellow ranchers gathered and passing stagecoaches stopped for food and repairs. Its two-rooms-per-floor plan around a central 'dog-trot' hall was typical of the era.

McKinney, TX

Jesse Stiff arrived from Virginia in 1835 and claimed thousands of acres in what became Collin County, and a community called Stiff Chapel grew up around the family's homesteads. When his son James, serving as a Texas Ranger, died in 1847, he was buried near the family house on land that became this two-acre cemetery — most of its graves dating from the 1800s, with the last burial in 1935.

Big Lake, TX

Established around 1903 on the ranchland of settlers G. W. and Lizzie Stiles, this three-acre cemetery reads like a frontier chronicle. Its graves hold cowboys killed in range accidents, a Spanish-American War veteran, and victims of shootings, rattlesnake bites, and a dysentery epidemic—though most, the marker notes, were pioneers of quiet and steady lives. The plot was deeded to the county in 1920 by J. D. Wagner, a wanderer who split his years between Texas and South America.

Big Lake, TX

Built in 1911 from stone quarried just half a mile away at a cost of $20,000, this courthouse served the county until 1925, when the seat of government moved to Big Lake. In the years that followed it found new life as a community center and, for a single year, a school.

Charlevoix, MI

During World War II, the U.S. Navy's submarine force paid a terrible price for its successes against Japanese shipping: 52 boats were lost, carrying 374 officers and 3,131 enlisted men who never returned. In Navy tradition these submarines and their crews are said to be "still on patrol," eternally at their stations. This memorial keeps that vigil in their honor.

Jefferson, TX

Completed for Louisiana cotton broker Frank Stilley and his wife Minerva around their 1860 marriage, this Greek Revival house passed by 1885 to Charlie Young, a formerly enslaved man who became a well-known Jefferson barber. Young wore a Prince Albert suit as his working uniform and gave regular customers personalized shaving mugs lettered in gold. His family kept the home until 1983, a rare thread of continuity through Reconstruction and beyond.

Stillman Valley, IL

In May 1832, during the Black Hawk War, a body of Illinois militia clashed with Black Hawk's Sauk and Fox warriors here in a rout that became known as Stillman's Run. The dead were buried on this ground, and tradition holds that a young volunteer named Abraham Lincoln helped lay them to rest. The monument marks both a frontier battle and the future president's brush with it.

Churchill County, NV

Named for the calm pools nearby, Stillwater took shape as an overland stage station in 1862 — two years before Nevada's statehood — gained a post office in 1865, and became Churchill County's third county seat in 1868. Its population peaked around 1880, and when the seat moved to Fallon in 1904 barely thirty residents remained. Though its town center is gone, the valley's fertile fields still testify to its pioneer ranchers, and the 163,000-acre Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1949, now adjoins the Stillwater Indian Reservation.

Dayton, TX

Stilson sprang up in the 1890s when the Texas and New Orleans Railroad reached this stretch of Liberty County and out-of-state developers O. H. Stilson and Rodney Hill bought land to lay out a town. They advertised it to farmers in Iowa, and many families answered the call, including Swedish immigrants who came to build homes and farms. At its height the town boasted a fourteen-room hotel, stores, a gin, a rice mill, and a depot, but as people drifted to nearby Dayton it faded away.

San Antonio, TX

Founded by the remarkable Stinson family, this field has seen aviation grow from barnstormers to jets. Katherine Stinson learned to fly in 1912 to fund her music studies and became the fourth licensed woman pilot in the U.S.; she and sister Marjorie soon trained American and Canadian military fliers here. The family leased this land in 1916, and the field served as a civil airport, a WPA-improved terminal, and an Army Air Corps training base through two world wars — Charles Lindbergh himself flew out of it.

McKees Rocks, PA

In 1976 the United States marked its 200th birthday, and communities across the country threw parades, buried time capsules, and raised markers to the occasion. The Sto-Rox Bicentennial Committee — named for the twin boroughs of Stowe Township and McKees Rocks along the Ohio River west of Pittsburgh — left this monument as a message across a full century, addressed from the people of 1976 to the people of 2076. It captures a moment when a hard-working industrial river town paused to place itself in the long arc of the American story.

Stockdale, TX

Before the 1870s, Stockdale-area families buried their dead in small private plots, until an unrelated young man thrown from his horse needed a resting place and Dr. T. M. Batte donated an acre for a community burial ground. The cemetery grew through further gifts of land, including a 1938 acre set aside for anyone lacking a family plot. Among those interred are town founder John R. King, first schoolteacher Martin West, war veterans, and victims of the post–World War I flu epidemic.

Monte Alto, TX

Between 1912 and 1914 Swedish immigrants recruited by a Minnesota land company settled this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley, drawn by cheap, fertile farmland. They built churches, a school, a store, and a cotton gin, and pooled knowledge through a farm club while raising cotton, grain, corn, and dairy. Today little remains of Stockholm but its cemetery, a quiet marker of a vanished immigrant town.

Granbury, TX

In 1854 Thomas "Uncle Tommy" Lambert and Amon Bond led settlers, mostly from Tennessee, across the Brazos River to found Stockton Bend, whose riverside location offered protection and crossings at Abe's Crossing and Landers Ferry. The community gained a saloon, blacksmith, stores, and a school, and its residents shaped the new Hood County after 1866—a county-seat dispute here even led to the creation of Somervell County. By the early twentieth century the town had faded, its school closing in 1911.

Bartlett, TX

Founded on land first granted to a veteran of the Siege of Bexar, this cemetery began in 1890 with the burial of the Stocktons' fifteen-year-old son and grew alongside a family that settled Bell County in 1870. Among the more than eighty graves is Ead White, a formerly enslaved man who stayed with the family after the Civil War, and members lost to the deadly 1919 Corpus Christi hurricane.

Clarendon, TX

Stockton P. Donley came to Texas from Kentucky in 1846 and built a legal career before the Civil War. He enlisted as a private in 1861, was captured with his regiment after the hard fight at Fort Donelson, and endured months as a prisoner at Camp Douglas; his broken health afterward kept him from the front. Elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1866, he was removed the next year by federal military authority for his Confederate service, and the county later erected here bears his name.

Goliad, TX

One of Goliad's oldest buildings, this house may date to the 1820s and was certainly standing before pioneer settler Jessie W. Stoddard bought the property in 1847. Sold in 1879 to the wife of a local cattle rancher, it stayed in that family into the next century and still shows the layered additions of successive owners.

Newburgh, IN

This home stands in the old river town of Newburgh, an Ohio River port that grew quickly in the first half of the 19th century as steamboats tied the young Indiana frontier to markets downstream. Houses like this one survive from Newburgh's antebellum heyday, when the bustling landing rivaled nearby Evansville before the railroads shifted trade away. The marker identifies a contributing building in the town's preserved historic core.

Lander County, NV

Rising like a transplanted Roman ruin over the Nevada high desert, Stokes Castle was built in 1897 by mine developer and railroad magnate Anson Phelps Stokes as a summer retreat for his sons. Modeled on a medieval tower he had admired near Rome, its three floors of granite—raised by hand winch and set with rock wedging and clay mortar—held fireplaces, plate-glass windows, balconies, plumbing, and lavish furnishings. The family used it for only two months, and it has stood essentially empty ever since, becoming one of the West's most photographed oddities.

Temple vicinity, TX

Peter and Mary Isabella Stokes came to Bell County from Virginia in the late 1850s with their children and Mrs. Stokes's parents, Nathaniel and Mary Nelson. Begun in 1858 with the burial of a relative, this small graveyard on the Stokes farm holds about ten graves, including those of both couples. Restored in the 1980s, it stands as a quiet emblem of the county's pioneer beginnings.

Templeton, MA

In a New England mill village, a bridge was rarely just a river crossing — it was the thread that stitched a scattered community together. This stone span in Templeton carried townsfolk to the everyday engines of local life: a sawmill turning timber into boards, a grist mill grinding the neighborhood's grain, the meetinghouse where civic and religious life converged, and a district schoolhouse. The enumerated stops — from Wilkinson's to the curiously named 'Lead Pipe Man' — read like a directory of a self-sufficient early industrial hamlet, where water power and foot traffic set the rhythm of the day.

Nacogdoches, TX

The original Old Stone Fort, built in the late 1700s under Spanish rule, was a fixture through decades of upheaval in East Texas before its demolition in 1902 sparked statewide dismay and helped galvanize the historic-preservation movement. A local women's club opened a memorial building in 1908, and as the 1936 Texas Centennial approached, historical organizations pressed for a truer replica. Designed by Hal B. Tucker on the campus of what is now Stephen F. Austin State University, the Stone Fort Museum opened in 1936 and has since interpreted the Spanish and Mexican eras of Texas history.

Palmer, MA

This carved stone fountain offered a drink of water to passersby, its basin fed by a public spring in the heart of Palmer. Its inscription borrows the words of John's Gospel — Christ's promise of living water to the woman at the well — turning an everyday roadside amenity into a small moment of reflection. Public fountains like this one were civic gifts common in New England towns, quenching the thirst of travelers, horses, and townsfolk alike in an age before bottled water and drinking taps.

Clarksville, TX

Parson Amos M. Stone, a New York–born Cumberland Presbyterian minister, moved his large family from Tennessee to the Clarksville area in 1857 and soon founded a church on ground near this cemetery. During the Civil War he served in a Confederate home guard while at least three of his sons joined the Confederate cause, and his 1862 death made his the first known grave here. His church later merged away and the nearby Cherry School faded, but the cemetery endures as a record of the settlers he served.

Stoneham, TX

Organized in 1885 by a dozen members from the Plantersville church, Stoneham Methodist served its new railroad-era community first in a schoolhouse under circuit-riding ministers, then in a frame sanctuary built in 1893 with its first full-time pastor. The congregation flourished in the 1920s, closed twice as area population declined, and was revived in 1973 to continue serving the area. Its ebb and flow mirrors the fortunes of small rural Texas towns.

Humboldt County, NV

Long before the railroad, this spot on the Humboldt corridor was a natural camping place for Native people and for emigrants pushing west. In the 1860s the Overland Stage Company raised a stone house here as a dining and overnight stop, and when the Central Pacific pushed through in 1868 the nearby springs watered its locomotives. A little trackside settlement grew up to serve railroaders and ranchers, complete with a post office that ran from 1890 until 1915 before the place faded away.

Center Point, TX

George L. Leigh, a Missouri native, moved to Kerr County in 1878 for his health and opened a store in Center Point before serving a term as county tax assessor. In 1883 he bought a 640-acre tract and, with his brother Edward's help, expanded it past three thousand acres, running a dairy and raising racing horses. Named for the family's ancestral home in England, Stoneleigh Ranch later operated as a guest ranch from 1936 to 1943 and stayed in the Leigh family until 1960.

Statesville, NC

In the closing days of the Civil War, Union General George Stoneman led a sweeping cavalry raid through western North Carolina, striking at railroads, supplies, and towns. On April 13, 1865, his troopers occupied Statesville, days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The raid brought the war's destruction to a corner of the state that had largely escaped it.

Blowing Rock, NC

In the closing weeks of the Civil War, Union Major General George Stoneman led a sweeping cavalry raid across western North Carolina to wreck Confederate supply lines and rail infrastructure. On March 28, 1865, part of that force under General Alvan C. Gillem passed through this vicinity near Blowing Rock, one stop on a fast-moving campaign through the mountains. The raid met little organized resistance as the Confederacy collapsed in the war's final month.

Morganton, NC

During Union General George Stoneman's raid through western North Carolina in the last weeks of the Civil War, his cavalry skirmished with Confederate defenders near Morganton on April 17, 1865. Coming just days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the clash was one of the scattered final fights of a collapsing Confederacy in the Carolina mountains. The raiders pressed on through Burke County, targeting supplies, railroads, and remaining Confederate resistance.

Salisbury, NC

On April 12, 1865, Union cavalry under General George Stoneman occupied Salisbury and set about destroying its value to the dying Confederacy. His troopers burned warehouses and supplies and wrecked the notorious Confederate prison, where thousands of captives had suffered and many had died. The raid came just after Lee's surrender, as the Confederate war effort disintegrated.

Rowan County, NC

In the closing days of the Civil War, Union General George Stoneman led a sweeping cavalry raid through western North Carolina, tearing up railroads and supply lines. On April 12, 1865 — days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox — his troopers skirmished with Confederate defenders near this spot. The Confederacy was collapsing, but scattered fighting continued as word of the war's end spread slowly.

Stonewall, TX

This cemetery first served Millville, a settlement laid out after the Civil War by Israel Nuñez, who ran a nearby stage stop. Though Nuñez set aside the ground early, it was not formally deeded until 1934, and its earliest marked grave dates to 1879. Millville became Stonewall in 1875, and after a pause the cemetery saw burials resume in 1966.

Aspermont, TX

The rolling country of Stonewall County holds a deep frontier history: Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado passed through in 1541, and U.S. Army mapmakers followed in 1849. Its salt springs supplied settlers, and from 1876 to 1879 the rough buffalo-hunters' town of Rath City reigned as a hide-trade capital. The county, created in 1876 and organized in 1888, honors Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and its seat shifted from Rayner to higher-set Aspermont in 1898.

San Benito, TX

Barely two decades after San Benito's founding, a 1920s boom left the young Rio Grande Valley town short of places for its many visitors to stay. In a burst of civic ambition, local businessmen sold stock door-to-door in December 1925, raising the capital to build a three-story Spanish Revival hotel that opened with a gala in October 1927. Named for the Civil War general and hung with a commissioned portrait of him, the 83-room hotel became the town's social heart, hosting weddings, dances, and banquets for decades.